Law.Gov Update

I must admit things were a bit tight earlier this week at Public.Resource.Org when I called the payroll
company and put the full-time staff (i.e., me) on a temporary involuntary furlough. We had just enough
to pay contractors and rent, but that was pretty much it.

Some of you may have noted
today’s Google 10^100 announcement which has resulted in a rather remarkable transformation in our
balance sheet (not to mention some serious rocket fuel for Law.Gov!):

Public.Resource.Org, Inc.
Balance Sheet Standard
As of September 24, 2010

Sep 24, ’10

Sep 23, ’10

Current Assets

Checking/Savings

Paypal

55.57

55.57

Citibank Money Market

551.41

551.41

Citibank

1,001,293.42

1,293.42

Total Checking/Savings

1,001,900.40

1,900.40

Other Current Assets

Grants Receivable

1,000,000.00

0.00

Total Other Current Assets

1,000,000.00

0.00

Total Current Assets

2,001,900.40

1,900.40

“What a Diff’rence a Day Makes!”

This grant is going to help Public.Resource.Org continue our work on Law.Gov and Video.Gov.
For Law.Gov, this is going to mean a shift into real production, building on the very solid
consensus that was reached earlier this year on the Core Law.Gov Principles.
There are going to be a series of announcements over the remainder of this year, but there are
three things we can share with you today:

The first step in creating the Law.Gov Report is cleaning up and cataloging all the work
from our 15 Law.Gov workshops that took place from January to June of this year.Point.B Studio
and Foolish Tree Films have been hard at working creating a 15-DVD set of workshop proceedings
with approximately 70 pieces of video. The video will all get released as a final mix on the net
as well as on DVDs printed at Lulu, and this core will form the basis for the next steps of the
report. Stay tuned for more details.

The next step on the National Inventory of Legal Materials is going to be a bug tracker where people
can enter their survey results, in particular creating trouble tickets for jurisdictions that violate
the Law.Gov Core Principles. I’m pleased to report that Karl Fogel
of O’Reilly Media has been
hard at work on some software for this, based on the excellent MediaBugs base created by
Scott Rosenberg and crew, which in turn builds on the PeoplePods code base created by Internet rock
star Ben Brown. This software, natch, will be open source so you can use it to create other
kinds of bug trackers besides media and legal bugs.

If Law.Gov is going to work, we need lots more data. I’m pleased to report that we are close to a final
agreement with UC Hastings and the Internet Archive to scan 3 million pages of 9th Circuit briefs,
and we’ve sent California’s Title 24
out to be double-keyed, turning it from PDF scans into valid
markedup hypertext. We’re also launching a strong “think local” effort with a goal of making all
the local codes here in Sonoma and neighboring North Bay counties available for citizens and local
governments to work with (more on that effort at the upcoming Ignite Sebastopol).

The grant is also going to help fund our Video.Gov efforts, and this morning I placed an order
with C-SPAN for 500 DVDs of Congressional Hearings as part of our effort to get Congress to get it together and publish more video from hearings. We’re close to a digitization agreement with the National
Agricultural Library, we intend to keep working with our band of IASL volunteers and will of course do everything we can to help our colleague Andrew
McLaughlin in his personal quest
to see Video.Gov enter the .Gov domain.